New Low Latency Fiber Optic Services For Atlanta

Atlanta, Georgia is a major hub for fiber optic traffic serving the United States and International destinations. It’s also the home of many Fortune 500 companies and thousands of enterprises in need of high performance bandwidth services. AboveNet has recognized a growing need in the Atlanta metro market and is making a major expansion of its low latency fiber optic routes for downtown Atlanta, Alpharetta, Buckhead and Norcross.

AboveNet is a highly competitive carrier that focuses on high bandwidth connectivity. They operate about 2.3 million fiber miles in top US and European markets feeding more than 2,800 optically-enabled commercial buildings. Their major hubs in the SouthEast are Atlanta and Miami, with others in Houston, Austin, Dallas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco / San Jose, Portland, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Boston Philadelphia, Baltimore, The New York Metro Area and the Washington DC Corridor. In addition, AboveNet connects to Asia in Tokyo, Japan and to Europe in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris.

These AboveNet hubs are connected by DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) equipment that terminates the fiber runs. Most backbone trunks offer 10 Gbps, with individual city locations providing up to 40 Gbps connectivity for carriers and companies that need this capacity.

AboveNet is making its complete suite of high performance bandwidth services available to businesses in the Atlanta metropolitan area. These include both Metro Area Network (MAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN), plus WDM Wavelength Services, Metro Ethernet, WAN Ethernet and IP Transit.

Few providers can offer wavelength services for MAN users. These include standardized Carrier Ethernet services that have the MEF 9 and MEF 14 certificates. Single wavelength service offers a 40 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps or 1 Gbps wave service to extend your corporate LAN/WAN to multiple metro area locations. Data mirroring can be done with a Fiber Channel, ESCON or FICON wave. Both protected and unprotected options are available.

Metro WDM applications include virtualization and the serverless office, real time transactions backup and high speed business continuity, streaming multimedia, Storage Area Network (SAN), delivering mission critical enterprise data and applications, and e-commerce transactions. There are basic, enhanced and custom wave solutions to meet any business requirement up to 40 Gbps.

WAN services allow you to reach beyond your metro area to connect with other metro locations are around the world. eXpressWave long haul optical transport is a point to point inter-city connection service that supports voice, data and video between more than 78 city pair combinations. Bandwidth options include 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps going from POP to POP. Metro connectivity is available in top US and European cities for companies with national and international business locations.

Do you have a business in the Atlanta metro area or other major city in the US that needs very high performance connectivity for metropolitan, national or international business needs? If so, get pricing and features for the fiber optic bandwidth solutions you need from AboveNet and other high performance carriers.




Note: Photo of downtown Atlanta at twilight courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Internet Wholesale Bandwidth Options

There are two types of organizations that buy Internet bandwidth. Most are end users. They want the access for their employees. The others are resellers. They take large Internet connections and divvy up the bandwidth to hundreds or thousands of individuals and businesses. These are Internet Service Providers (ISPs) looking to buy at wholesale and sell at retail.

The largest networks in the world, called Tier 1, don’t purchase Internet access. They are part of the core network itself. Those major world wide networks exchange traffic on basis of equals called peering. Each network gets as much traffic as it sends to the others, so all benefit and no money is exchanged.

Everyone else has to get to the Internet by accessing one of these Tier 1 networks. The next level down, the Tier 2 networks, are also very large Internet service providers. Since they don’t have the enormous global traffic to participate in peering, they purchase what is called IP Transit. This is Internet access sold on a per Megabit per second per month basis.

Smaller Tier 3 networks can purchase IP Transit from Tier 2 networks, if they are large enough to have an assigned AS or Autonomous System number (ASN) to identify them as part of the Internet. Large scale ISPs fall into this category as well as some large corporations and other organizations.

Local and regional Internet Service Providers, including WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers), buy DIA or Dedicated Internet Access. DIA connections are like point to point private lines, except that one end connects to the Internet. Other private line characteristics still apply. The bandwidth provided is completely dedicated to the ISP and not shared with anyone else. There are generally SLAs or Service Level Agreements that spell out characteristics such as maximum latency, jitter and packet loss as well as time to respond to outages and time to make repairs.

Dedicated also means that there are no extra charges for heavily loading the line. You can use the entire capacity of the circuit in both directions or only some of it. The price is the same.

The smallest DIA service is usually a T1 line running at 1.5 Mbps. This is a symmetrical service, meaning 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download. Usually the download path is much heavier loaded than the upload path for typical Internet access. If fact most consumer Internet access is sold with 5x to 10x higher speeds on download than upload. For business users, upload speeds can be important when transferring large files to remote backup sites and servers within colocation centers.

Obviously, T1 lines can’t serve a large user base but they work great for WiFi hotspots and rural or subdivision WISP service where signed-up customers number in the dozens, not hundreds. A nice feature of T1 lines is that they can be bonded by adding more lines to double, triple and quadruple bandwidth up to about 10 or 12 Mbps. The other nice feature of T1 lines is that they are available where other line services don’t reach. If you can get business telephone system into a facility, you can probably get T1 DIA service.

The next increment in traditional telecom bandwidth is DS3, also called T3 lines. This service runs at 45 Mbps which is large enough for a good size service provider to offer competitive bandwidth. Beyond that, SONET fiber optic services include OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps and OC48 at 2.5 Gbps are very popular.

A strong competitor to T-Carrier and SONET bandwidth is Carrier Ethernet. It comes in two flavors, Ethernet over Copper (EoC) typically from 1 to 50 Mbps and Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps. In a some metropolitan areas, you can also get EoFW or Ethernet over Fixed Wireless at DS3 and Fast Ethernet speeds. Where available, Carrier Ethernet tends to have considerably better pricing than other services.

Do you resell Internet access to other ISPs or end users? If so, see if you can get better wholesale pricing on Dedicated Internet Access and IP Transit services.

IP Transit vs Peering vs DIA

We live in a world of networks and networks of networks. The Internet is the ultimate example of networks upon networks upon networks. All of these networks need some way to communicate. For that, you have the choice of IP transit or peering.

Network to network communication would be unnecessary if the Internet was constructed the way most people envision it. When we think of the Internet, we think of one giant network that links everyone to everyone. It generally works that way for the end user, but the notion of a monolithic universal network is an illusion. Look inside the Internet and you’ll find it to be a collection of large, medium and small networks that all work together to get packets from one point to another. Let’s see what that takes.

At the top of the heap are Tier 1 networks. These are huge international IP networks that have points of presence in key locations around the world. Tier 1 networks are indeed the superhighways of the Internet. But like all highway systems, they don’t go everywhere. In order to create an Internet, you need to connect these superhighways together.

The connection process is called peering. The name suggests that this is a connection between equals or peers. That’s exactly right. Huge networks have huge amounts of traffic. If two of these networks peer to exchange traffic on an equal basis, then each network effectively doubles its reach. Network A has access to all the customers on Network B and vice versa.

Tier 1 networks peer on a settlement free basis. In other words, the networks are interconnected via high capacity routers and the traffic flows back and forth at will. Settlement free means that there are no toll booths at the border. Neither network pays the other because they are getting equal value through peering.

Not all networks are the same size. Smaller networks, called Tier 2, have less capacity and less reach than Tier 1 networks. Tier 1 networks aren’t about to peer with Tier 2 networks at no charge because the smaller network would be getting a lot more value from the arrangement than the larger one. What Tier 2 networks can do is ban together and peer among themselves to create a much larger entity that can compete with those Tier 1 networks. If they want access to the Tier 1 networks, they can pay a settlement charge based on the traffic imbalance. That charge is called IP transit.

Internet Service Providers have a choice when it comes to accessing the Internet. They can spend the capital and maintenance cost to build out their networks to the point where they can peer with other large networks, or they can just purchase IP transit services from a large network and avoid the investment in equipment and personnel.

Very small networks or medium size companies with their own internal networks will choose to buy Dedicated Internet Access rather than IP transit. You need to be a network operator with an assigned AS or Autonomous System number (ASN) that identifies each network on the Internet in order to qualify for IP Transit services. Some large organizations with connections to multiple networks may fit this definition, as well as large scale ISPs.

Everyone else, from local WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) to SMBs (Small to Medium Size Businesses) simply purchases Dedicated Internet Access by the Mbps or Gbps of bandwidth. Operation of the Internet is left to those networks who specialize in that service.

What type of Internet connectivity makes the most sense for your business? It depends on whether you are a large ISP, a content delivery network, a large corporation with international locations, or a network of retail stores. Why not compare pricing options for IP Transit, Peering, or Dedicated Internet Access, as appropriate? Complementary consulting services are available to help you sort through the possibilities.

40 Gbps Bandwidth Available For Business

XO Communications has upped the ante on business bandwidth options by making two 40 Gbps network services available in all major metropolitan markets of its nationwide fiber optic footprint. Listen to Randy Nicklas, Chief Technology Officer of XO Communications, explain the advantages of the new 40 Gbps wavelength and IP transit services:



You may listen to the interview without leaving this page by using this built-in audio player:


Clearly, we’re entering a new and exciting era of very high bandwidth applications for businesses as well as service providers, such as Cable companies. High speed financial trading demands the lowest latencies possible. You snooze for a millisecond, you lose. This pushes the requirements for both transport speed between cities and also minimal time delays going through the routing and switching equipment. Content delivery networks may be less latency sensitive than the financial trading networks, but they have an insatiable need for bandwidth. There is no upper limit in sight as of this writing. Surely 40 Gbps is just a incremental level on the way to 100 Gbps and beyond. Why? Because everybody wants the video they want to see when they want to see it, and high definition video has massive bandwidth demands. Every Internet user on Earth couldn’t possibly send enough email, visit enough web sites, or update their software often enough to match even the current demand for video transport. This is why Cable TV companies and other video distributors are moving away from the public Internet to privately run content delivery networks to meet their demands for bandwidth and stability. Is your company involved in video production or distribution, or perhaps financial services? If so, you certainly have demands for high levels of wide area networking bandwidth at reasonable prices. Other business users may not be pushing the technology limits just yet, although getting the best prices on fiber optic bandwidth is equally important. For all of these situations, you can find highly competitive fiber optic bandwidth pricing from XO Communications and other top tier providers through our GigaPackets bandwidth service and Telarus expert consultants.

XO Communications Nears Tbps National Network

If there is any doubt in your mind that the widely discussed bandwidth glut of the great telecom boom in the late 90's has all but evaporated, this news should make it clear. XO communications is implementing an upgrade of its national backbone that was just upgraded last year. The core fiber bandwidth is being extended from 400 Gbps to 800 Gbps on major coast to coast network routes. Just another 200 Gbps and we're talking Terabit/second bandwidth.

Is near-Tbps bandwidth really needed? Apparently so. XO cites a 5x increase in orders for high capacity inter-city network transport services within the last year. Inter-city and metro transport demands are coming from telecom carriers, cable companies, content providers, large enterprises and wireless companies. These major users will then deploy that bandwidth in smaller fractions to serve B2B and B2C applications, including connectivity to branch offices and SMBs (small to medium size businesses). Applications such as VoIP, HD video, video streaming, rich multimedia content, and faster broadband Internet services all sop up bandwidth at a prodigious rate. A Gigabit per second just isn't the cornucopia it used to be.

XO is being smart about their implementation. The plan is to light two new fiber strands using the Infinera DTN system that was deployed last year as part of the network upgrade to 400 Gbps. The 800 Gbps will be organized as 80 10-Gbps channels running over 18,000 route-miles of the nationwide network. XO's inter-city network currently connects 75 major metropolitan areas across the United States.

Fiber optic services offered by XO include Ethernet from GigE to 10 Gbps, IP transit and private line services from OC-3 to OC-192 and wavelength services at 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps speeds. XO also offers a complete suite of business services, with over 3,000 fiber-fed buildings on net, plus copper and wireless connectivity including traditional T1 voice and data services. Beyond connectivity, XO offers managed firewalls, VPNs and server collocation hosting.

If your business currently uses or would benefit from digital telephony, dedicated Internet service or point-to-point connectivity, we cordially invite you to discover how services from XO Communications and other competitive telecommunications carriers can give you the connections you need at surprisingly attractive rates. Simply call the toll free number or enter an easy online request through our GigaPackets.com service.